The following article appears in the January/February
2006 issue of The Alcalde.

From time to time, there emerges an individual who was
not a student at The University of Texas, but whose service makes a profound
and positive difference to the University.

To recognize this service, the Texas Exes created the Distinguished
Service Award, and on October 14, the Association awarded it for only the
fourth time, to Elspeth Davies Rostow. It was conferred at the LBJ Library
Auditorium during the Texas Exes’ Distinguished Alumnus Awards.

Elspeth Rostow has been a force at The University of Texas
since 1969, initially drawn to Austin with her late husband Walt by the research
value of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential papers. (Walt had served in the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was writing a book.) While she has
served as dean of both the LBJ School of Public Affairs and UT’s Division
of General and Comparative Studies, she is, first, a teacher. She says, “I
enjoy the simple act of teaching. It’s not transmitting information,
it’s enticing people into the world of ideas.”

She teaches about the American presidency and U.S. foreign
policy. Of studying Woodrow Wilson, one student wrote that “she takes
the presidency from the beginning of the development of the person. She relates
it to his life experience.”

Her open-door policy and exacting standards both for herself
and her students earned Rostow a 1988 Texas Exes Teaching Award.

Born in Manhattan, Rostow brought to The University of
Texas impressive academic credentials and internationally recognized expertise
in the area of public policy. Among her numerous presidential appointments,
President Ronald Reagan appointed her to the board of the U.S. Institute of
Peace, which she later chaired.

In 1991, she co-founded The Austin Project, a comprehensive
community investment program in children and young people. Late husband and
faculty colleague Walt Rostow said, “She’s extraordinarily concerned
with other people. She is an administrator with a green thumb. When she runs
something, it flourishes.”

A steadfast supporter, “Top Hand Award” recipient,
and Life Member of the Texas Exes, Rostow has served on the blue-ribbon committee
to select Texas Exes Scholars since 1982. Her friends and former students
established an Award of Recognition in her honor. Many Texas Exes Scholars
have excelled because they “survived” her rigorous interview,
and they were nurtured by her abiding interest in their lives and futures.

In 1996, The Alcalde described Rostow as having “never
a hair nor a thread nor a word out of place. She is quietly intense, notoriously
elegant, eloquent, proper, and continually self-deprecating.” She also
is a gourmet cook, limerick writer, and proud grandmother. Elspeth Rostow
has made a profound positive difference to The University of Texas.

What follows are her remarks upon receiving the award.

It is now 36 years and nine months since, with my family,
I came from Washington to Austin. It has been a wonderful period for me not
only because of the fact that I’ve been in this university and watched
it change and grow, but because it has given me a chance to live up to the
very wise words of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard when he said,
“You live life looking forward. You understand life looking backward.”
These 36 years have given me a chance to see what a university can be.

I am a child of academe. I was brought up in the atmosphere
of Columbia University, and I’ve been teaching now since the day that
World War II began. There is no connection between those two facts. But coming
to Texas has been the experience that I did not anticipate. I knew that I
loved teaching. I knew that I enjoyed being on the campus, but I didn’t
realize that to be in the University with such a dynamism, with such a capacity
to grow and to change, was an experience that I will treasure and that I will
share not indefinitely. I think it’s about time to stop teaching, but
as some of you know, I find it addictive. At this stage, I have a graduate
class of about 31. Six of them are lieutenant colonels in the Army; the rest
are civilians. But to watch them study national and international policy is
a privilege, because that’s what teaching is — it’s a privilege
to share with your students, with your colleagues, with your community whatever
it is that you have observed over the passage of time.

Benjamin Disraeli said that a university should be a place
of light, of liberty, and of learning. He can be forgiven for not putting
in “and football.” But this experience of watching light, learning,
and the experience of sharing with you, the graduates, of this great university
has been something for which I am eternally grateful. And this day, this opportunity
to thank The University of Texas, is something I looked forward to, as it
turns out now, for these past 30 years. I thank you, I thank the University,
and I am convinced now, as a historian, that I watch a work in progress, and
the progress is great. A work in progress, and the goal of excellence is within
reach. An experience that very few people are privileged to have. And so I
turn not to these distinguished graduates alone, but to all of you, and say,
thank you very much.